A Geeky Treasure Hunt

Today, Cheri and I went on our first Geocaching excursion. For those who don’t know, Geocaching is like a world-wide treasure hunt. People will place caches in different locations, record the location’s coordinates, and publish the coordinates on a geocaching website (such as www.geocaching.com) Then people who visit the website can enter their location to get the coordinates of caches close to them. Then you can use your GPS device to locate the cache. Most caches have a logbook and some kind of treasure. The logbook contains notes from everyone who has visited that cache. The treasure can be any range of small trinkets. The main rule of caches is that if you take something, make sure you leave something. That way the cache always has something in it other than the logbook.

The cache we found today was in a wooded area near a park not to far from our apartment. I got the coordinates from Geocaching.com, and placed them in my new Garmin eTrex GPS device my parents got me for Christmas. Then it told me where to go to find it. It was really fun trying to figure out where it was. We eventually found it in a hollowed out tree trunk. It was a camouflage ammunition box. This particular cache was a book-crossing cache. In this cache people take and leave books to pass around. So the cache had about four books in there, plus the logbook. We didn’t take any of the books, because we didn’t bring any to leave, but we still signed the logbook. After that, we placed the cache back where we found it for the next visitors.

This was a very fun activity and Cheri and I look forward to doing it again. There are plenty of items hidden around the area we live, so we don’t even have to go far to find treasure! I feel like a 21st century pirate!

FYI

My name is Eric and I live in Burke, Virginia.

Here are a few tidbits about me: Chesapeake, Virginia is my hometown; Cheri is my lovely wife; Photography and pool are my most active hobbies; Crohn's Disease is my ailment; Virginia Tech and The George Washington University are the schools I graduated from; Cookies & Cream is my favorite ice cream flavor.

Also, fallenposters is the alias I use on most websites. It was the first username I came up with when joining instant messenger in college. The first thing I saw was the posters that had fallen from my dorm room wall, and the rest is history.